{"id":97253,"date":"2016-05-25T08:15:34","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T16:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97253"},"modified":"2016-05-25T08:15:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T16:15:34","slug":"ny-times-to-australia-open-those-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97253","title":{"rendered":"NY TIMES to Australia: Open Those Borders!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.vdare.com\/posts\/ny-times-to-australia-open-those-borders\">John Derbyshire writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>One of the first pieces I ever published on VDARE.com, on September 4<sup>th<\/sup> 2001, was about Australia\u2019s policy towards illegal immigrants.  Titled <em>\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vdare.com\/articles\/nice-guys-get-illegal-immigrants\">Nice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants<\/a>,\u201d<\/em> that piece reported on the <em>Tampa<\/em> incident.<\/p>\n<p><em>Tampa<\/em> was a small Norwegian cargo ship that had rescued 438 illegals, mostly Afghans, from an Indonesian fishing boat\u2014owned by people smugglers, of course\u2014that had foundered on its way to Australian territory.<\/p>\n<p>The Australian government took a firm line.  An international incident involving Australia, Norway, and Indonesia followed.<\/p>\n<p>As my title indicated, the point of my article was to predict that the <em>Tampa<\/em> illegals would eventually be allowed to settle in Australia.  In fact New Zealand took a third of them.  Of the others, many were settled in Australia (I can\u2019t find precise numbers), but others were repatriated to Afghanistan when the Taliban government fell.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Tampa<\/em> incident led to implementation of the \u201cPacific Solution,\u201d under which Australia paid small, poor nearby island nations to accommodate illegals in camps while refugee claims were investigated.<\/p>\n<p>The Pacific Solution has undergone some modifications and name changes, but is still the basis of Australian policy towards illegals today.<\/p>\n<p>Australians seem stubbornly resolved that right of settlement in their country should be determined by them and their representatives, not by people-smuggling criminal gangs.<\/p>\n<p>To their great credit, Australia has continued to apply its immigration laws firmly, refusing settlement rights to illegals except where claims to refugee status meet a high standard of proof.<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rT12WH4a92w?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>As Prime Minister John Howard said at the time of the <em>Tampa<\/em> incident: \u201cWe cannot surrender our right as a sovereign country to control our borders. We cannot have a situation where people can come to this country when they choose.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That approach is very shocking to immigration romantics in Australia and elsewhere.  Monday\u2019s <em>New York Times<\/em> ran an op-ed by Roger Cohen, a stalwart defender of the <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">Indonesian crime cartels<\/span> huddled masses yearning to breathe free:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 The Australian treatment of refugees trying to reach this vast, thinly populated country by boat follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty. It begins with the anodyne name for the procedures \u2014 \u201coffshore processing\u201d \u2014 as if these desperate human beings were just an accumulation of data.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Note please that Australia is \u201cthinly populated\u201d for a very good reason:  most of the place is <a href=\"https:\/\/c2.staticflickr.com\/2\/1198\/5104067923_1d25f3697e_b.jpg\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'https:\/\/c2.staticflickr.com\/2\/1198\/5104067923_1d25f3697e_b.jpg', 'uninhabitable']);\" >uninhabitable<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It continues with the secrecy shrouding what goes on \u201coffshore\u201d in the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where a total of more than 1,350 people languish with no notion of how their limbo will end, where they will go or how to get answers to their predicament. Under the Australian Border Force Act of last year, disclosure by any current or former worker of \u201cprotected information\u201d is punishable by up to two years in prison.<\/p>\n<p>It goes further with the progressive dehumanization of people \u2014 dubbed \u201cillegals\u201d without cause \u2014 who are caught in this Australian web under a policy now dating back almost four years. They are rarely visible. They are often nameless, merely given identification numbers. Women and children are vulnerable in squalid conditions where idleness and violence go hand in hand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>While I\u2019m trawling my archives, I may as well link to a piece I wrote back in October 2000 scoffing at news outlets putting scare quotes around the i-word.  [<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnderbyshire.com\/Opinions\/NationalQuestion\/immigrationhypocrisy.html\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/www.johnderbyshire.com\/Opinions\/NationalQuestion\/immigrationhypocrisy.html', 'Who Are You Calling \u201cIllegal\u201d?']);\" >Who Are You Calling \u201cIllegal\u201d?<\/a> National Review Online<\/em>, October 17<sup>th<\/sup> 2000.]  Why don\u2019t they <em>listen?<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The refugees are consistently demeaned, as when the conservative immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said this month that they could not read and would somehow contrive at once to steal Australian jobs and \u201clanguish in unemployment queues\u201d \u2014 a statement that prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to call Dutton \u201coutstanding,\u201d no less.<\/p>\n<p>Turnbull, who came to office with a reputation for being from the more progressive wing of the conservative Liberal Party but has proved beholden to the hard-line right, faces an election in early July. Clearly both he and Dutton reckon casting the marooned of Nauru and Manus Island as threats to Australia will play well with voters.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond electoral calculations, people are dying. Last month, a young Iranian refugee, Omid Masoumali, self-immolated on Nauru and died in a Brisbane hospital. Soon after, a 21-year-old Somali refugee, identified only as Hodan, set herself on fire and was taken in critical condition to Brisbane. Their acts were reflections of the desperation and exhaustion inflicted by Australia under a policy that was supposed to be temporary, has not been thought through, and places people in conditions of hopelessness.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps \u201coffshore processing\u201d was supposed to afford the government plausible deniability. Australia would pay billions of dollars to poor Nauru and poor Papua New Guinea to take a big problem off its hands. But in reality there can be no plausible deniability. On the contrary, by any ethical standard, the policy engages Australian responsibility for cruelty.<\/p>\n<p>Dutton even suggested that human rights advocates bore responsibility for the self-immolations by giving asylum seekers \u201cfalse hope.\u201d He said the government was \u201cnot going to stand for\u201d people trying to twist its arm. Well, a dead person cannot do that, of course.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>True:  but when a person tells you, \u201cIf you don\u2019t do as I wish, I\u2019ll kill myself,\u201d the choice before you is <em>either<\/em> to clearly assert your own autonomy <em>or<\/em> to surrender your will to his.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t see the boats, we rarely see a human face and there is a black hole of accountability,\u201d said Madeline Gleeson, a human rights lawyer and the author of the recently published book <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Offshore-Behind-Wire-Manus-Nauru\/dp\/1742234712?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1464183399&amp;ref_=tmm_pap_swatch_0&amp;sr=1-1\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Offshore-Behind-Wire-Manus-Nauru\/dp\/1742234712?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1464183399&amp;ref_=tmm_pap_swatch_0&amp;sr=1-1', 'Offshore']);\" >Offshore<\/a><\/em>. She told me, \u201cThe international community does not understand how outrageous this policy is, how far from basic human standards and how shot through with violence and sexual abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The government argues it is keeping the country safe from terrorism, preventing a proliferation of Australia-bound boats that could result in deaths on a scale seen in the Mediterranean, and ensuring its immigration policy remains orderly. In the current fiscal year, the country has offered to take in 13,750 people under its Humanitarian Program, and committed, exceptionally, to a further 12,000 from the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts (a handful of them have been processed). But it has vowed that nobody in Nauru or on Manus Island will gain admission to Australia.<\/p>\n<p>Australia\u2019s \u201coffshore processing\u201d is falling apart and must end. The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled in April that the Australian-funded detention center on Manus Island was illegal. In Australia, only retroactive legislation enacted after a lawsuit was filed provided legal support for a policy that was in effect pursued illegally since 2012.<\/p>\n<p>This country\u2019s history includes the long and unhappy chapter of its White Australia policy under which a vast land mass was portrayed as under threat of invasion by uncivilized \u201cnatives\u201d from across Asia. Politicians like Dutton are playing scurrilously on similar fears.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The White Australia policy was an effort to maintain Australia\u2019s character as a European settler nation.  In 1926, when my father went to Australia, the population was 5\u00bd million.  China and Imperial Japan at that time had populations of 320 million and 80 million respectively; and \u201cuncivilized\u201d is not an inappropriate descriptor for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnderbyshire.com\/Reviews\/China\/chiangkaishek.html#warlords\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/www.johnderbyshire.com\/Reviews\/China\/chiangkaishek.html#warlords', 'Warlord China']);\" >Warlord China<\/a>.  Was the White Australia policy unreasonable?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A nation of immigrants, short of agricultural labor, Australia has benefited when it has overcome its fears, as with the admission of Vietnamese \u201cboat people\u201d in the 1970s. As Steven Glass, an international lawyer, observed in introducing Eva Orner\u2019s new movie, \u201cChasing Asylum,\u201d \u201cWhat, exactly, are we scared of?\u201d Even women raped and impregnated on Nauru have been treated as if they are security threats.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>A word here about Australian women <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/nsw\/doonside-gang-rape-racial-tensions-close-to-boiling-point-community-leaders-say-20140212-32i8x.html\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/nsw\/doonside-gang-rape-racial-tensions-close-to-boiling-point-community-leaders-say-20140212-32i8x.html', 'raped and impregnated by immigrants']);\" >raped and impregnated by immigrants<\/a> might have been in order \u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Bring those stranded in Nauru and on Manus Island, many of whose refugee claims have already been deemed legitimate, to Australia. Treat them with humanity as their demands for permanent settlement are assessed. Scrap a policy that shames a nation with its pointless cruelty.  [<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/24\/opinion\/australias-offshore-cruelty.html?ref=opinion\" onclick=\"_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'outbound-article', 'http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/24\/opinion\/australias-offshore-cruelty.html?ref=opinion', 'Australia\u2019s Offshore Cruelty']);\" >Australia\u2019s Offshore Cruelty<\/a><\/em> by Roger Cohen; <em>NY Times<\/em>, May 23<sup>rd<\/sup> 2016.]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Derbyshire writes: One of the first pieces I ever published on VDARE.com, on September 4th 2001, was about Australia\u2019s policy towards illegal immigrants. Titled \u201cNice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants,\u201d that piece reported on the Tampa incident. Tampa was a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97253\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97254,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97253\/revisions\/97254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}